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Three Ways To Combine PPC And SEO For A Successful Marketing Strategy

When combined, PPC and SEO practices can considerably boost your international digital marketing campaign. Having personally worked in both PPC and SEO, I have collated a list of instances when combining these two areas of digital marketing brings successful results.

1. Monitor your PPC campaign to achieve SEO and content insights

A great way to improve your ranking position when you’re not in the first page results for your most significant keywords is to create a PPC campaign that targets them.

You can then monitor your campaign to determine which queries give you impressions but not clicks. Are these queries relevant to your business? Use this information to pick the direction in which your content should expand, as these are related topics for which your audience shows interest.

The image above shows an extract from an AdWords SQR. The keywords highlighted are receiving impressions, but the CTR is really low compared to other queries.

If these keywords are relevant and the content on your website is able to fulfil the request, you should tailor your message in order to attract the users. This will not only improve relevancy, but will also increase your ad quality score.

If the content is relevant but you are not providing the information requested by these queries, perhaps you should get inspired and create some.

The ad copies could also be used to get insights on your audience’s preferences by testing a few ad variations to determine which one triggers more conversions. You will then be able to use the headline that receives more clicks/conversions as a canvas for an effective and appealing H1.

Whether you are entering a new market and you need to get your brand known to the audience, or you are competing with big names in your industry and your ranking position is low, combining SEO and PPC can help you with brand awareness and increasing visibility/ranking.

Statistics show that the exposure you receive from a paid ad can signal it as trustworthy to consumers. Even when you rank # 1 in the Google search results, a PPC ad at the top improves traffic by 50%, but if you rank # 5 or lower, a PPC ad can boost traffic by 96%.

If you have achieved your goal to rank organically in the first results page, but not quite at the top, a great option would be to keep your ad relevant, but less attractive than your meta tag. The reason for this is that you are already on the first page by doing great SEO; you don’t need to pay for PPC, so you should use your ad to achieve visibility rather than clicks. Surely you want your free, organic results to get those clicks eventually!

The above image shows a great example of one company appearing on both PPC and SEO first results for the keywords “buy tv”.

As the purpose of the ad is to generate conversions, it clearly states ‘Spread the cost of a TV’, trying to attract those that are already committed to buying and might be tempted by Argos’ financing options. The meta tag has instead the clear and informative headline ‘Your Online Shop for Technology’, which is aimed at those who want to browse different models before making the purchase.

If you like the idea of working on combined strategies, but you aim to reduce your spending, you can remove the keywords with high CPC from your campaign and use them for your SEO strategy, so that you’ll appeal to the traffic more effectively.

3. Use PPC Ads and SEO insights strategically through the customer journey

If your website has weak ‘user engagement’ metrics, with low numbers for ‘average visit duration’ and ‘returning visitors’, you can consider using remarketing ads.

Remarketing ads will target people who visit your site, exposing them to banner ads after they leave.

On average, 96% of people who visit your site don’t convert to a lead or sale, and 70% of people who add items to the shopping cart leave without placing an order. Website visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert on your website.

Thanks to remarketing, you can segment your audience, tailor your messages and make sure you target the right people at the right time.

When monitoring your ‘New’ vs ‘Returning’ customers, an added bonus to gather insights is to select ‘Source’ as a secondary dimension, and identify where your best converting customers are coming from.

If you notice that the higher conversions come from organic search, you could run some search ads and see if you can add to those conversions.

If, for example, they come from Facebook, you can increase your ROI by doing more Facebook advertising and targeting the right demographic.

Alternatively, if you see that people are converting from email marketing messages, then keep them going and plan how you can expand your strategy.

Serena Mancini

SEO Content Specialist at Webcertain

Originally from Italy, Serena graduated in Media & Communication Studies, specialising in Multimedia Production. She joined Webcertain three years ago working on multilingual SEO and PPC projects. She is now responsible for assessing strengths and weaknesses of existing sites’ on-page performance in light of meta data optimisation, effective on-page keyword optimisation and preferring landing page assignments. She is also responsible for providing recommendations for implementing Schema.org mark-up / rich snippet mark-up.